Author
Topic: Voice acting in War in Heaven 2? (Read 4052 times)

Voice acting in War in Heaven 2?

Just finished through BP: War in Heaven I; what an incredible story thus far.

I started the campaign for BP: WiH II and there aren't any voice overs for briefings and in game comms.. Are they out there somewhere, or is that not finished yet? I looked around and all the threads on this specific topic are dated, just wondering if there was progress in that direction. Thanks!

Re: Voice acting in War in Heaven 2?

Act 3 (the "War in Heaven 2" campaign) has not been voice-acted (I want to say "yet", but it's unclear whether the team has any desire to go through the massive effort to coordinate said voice acting, based on their experience getting act 2 voiced).

<MageKing17> "There's probably a reason the code is the way it is" is a very dangerous line of thought. <MageKing17> Because the "reason" often turns out to be "nobody noticed it was wrong".(the very next day)<MageKing17> this ****ing code did it to me again<MageKing17> "That doesn't really make sense to me, but I'll assume it was being done for a reason."<MageKing17> **** ME<MageKing17> THE REASON IS PEOPLE ARE STUPID<MageKing17> ESPECIALLY ME

<MageKing17> God damn, I do not understand how this is breaking.<MageKing17> Everything points to "this should work fine", and yet it's clearly not working.<MjnMixael> 2 hours later... "God damn, how did this ever work at all?!"(...)<MageKing17> so<MageKing17> more than two hours<MageKing17> but once again we have reached the inevitable conclusion<MageKing17> How did this code ever work in the first place!?

<@The_E> Welcome to OpenGL, where standards compliance is optional, and error reporting inconsistent

<MageKing17> It was all working perfectly until I actually tried it on an actual mission.

<IronWorks> I am useful for FSO stuff again. This is a red-letter day!* z64555 erases "Thursday" and rewrites it in red ink

<MageKing17> TIL the entire homing code is held up by shoestrings and duct tape, basically.

Re: Voice acting in War in Heaven 2?

It is, at this point, extremely unlikely. Purely in terms of actual amount of lines, WiH Act 3 rivals some commercial games; there are a lot of speaking roles and a lot of lines for them. Getting WiH recorded was a nightmare and took years, Act 3 would not be any different.

Re: Voice acting in War in Heaven 2?

The hardest part of it is script generation. You've got to break up every single line in the campaign by role and then give a blurb of context for that line. Act 3 has a ****ton of lines.

Is there a guide or set of procedures for doing this, not in a general sense, but specifically for how Blue Planet does it? It sounds like something that can be done slowly over time by the community. Then once a complete script has done, we can have somekind of proofreading or discussion to ensure the script is acceptable, since there is a degree of subjectivity in this kind of work.

Re: Voice acting in War in Heaven 2?

Generating the script is actually fairly easy (there's even a few comfort functions built into FRED that make it easier), it's adding all the extra information (like intonation, context info) that voice actors need that takes some time and can become challenging.

And then, once that script is done, there's casting and recording to do, which for a project such as this means relying on the generosity of strangers who love doing voicework without getting paid. It's that latter part that takes a long, long time and a lot of effort to get right (to say nothing about the myriad of little tweaks that have to be done to missions to ensure that voice clips get played in the appropriate rhythm). It took years to make the AoA VA happen. It took longer (and, ultimately, quite a bit of money) to make WiH part one happen, and that means that whoever starts this effort has to be comfortable with the fact that it's likely to be a very long-term project.

Re: Voice acting in War in Heaven 2?

I'd say that the idea is pretty good - I mean, you could use any help, right? Even if there's not much to help with, there are definitely ways to support BP somehow...

And about moneys. I know, law says no one is to benefit financially from FSO, but what any donators would, instead of transferring money to BP devs' accounts, just push the cash directly to voice actors' accounts?

Re: Voice acting in War in Heaven 2?

That's I meant by a set of procedures. I was thinking something that went over the steps down to the details, like a fully fleshed out example problem solved by the professor kind of deal. If Battuta or someone else can show us the steps on an actual piece of the script, we can try to match the format, conventions, etc. for the rest of the script. I mean treating this almost like a FRED tutorial. I think doing it this way will ensure consistency across the script, so you don't have a dozen different styles/interpretations from a community effort.

Re: Voice acting in War in Heaven 2?

The whole BP2 script was public on gdocs. Should be easy to pull up the link.

The problem is that the crowdsourced line notes often end up needing revision to meet one standard and to really clarify pronunciation and context.

Jeebus. It's like you got summoned by the mere mention of Battuta on a forum post.

But yeah, I wouldn't mind taking a look at the script. It would at least give me and others an idea of the task at hand. Is this an internal link shared by Blue Planet dev members, or is there some place I can actually look this up.

Re: Voice acting in War in Heaven 2?

If anyone is going to do this I would recommend saving your sanity and not trying to voice/script the Dreamscape lines yet. There's so god damn many of them and by far the biggest difference voice acting would bring would be in the big chaotic missions where it's hard to focus on both the mission and reading text.

Re: Voice acting in War in Heaven 2?

The good Christian should beware of mathematicians, and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that the mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and to confine man in the bonds of Hell.

Re: Voice acting in War in Heaven 2?

While describing problems with the VA process, it's probably also worth noting that there were mistakes in the WiH act 2 script (I can't recall exactly how many lines were missing, if I ever knew, but I seem to remember there being more than one instance of Battuta panicking on IRC because the script was incomplete and so a role was missing one or more lines and there was some difficulty in contacting whoever had recorded it).

Also, I'm fairly certain that 277-page google doc is missing some fairly substantial roles because they were cast before it was made? Like, I don't think Brie's lines are in there, for example. So even discounting roles that are missing lines, the script is still incomplete, so the complete script of WiH Act 2 would be even longer... and I'm pretty sure that act 3 has even more dialogue than act 2.

<MageKing17> "There's probably a reason the code is the way it is" is a very dangerous line of thought. <MageKing17> Because the "reason" often turns out to be "nobody noticed it was wrong".(the very next day)<MageKing17> this ****ing code did it to me again<MageKing17> "That doesn't really make sense to me, but I'll assume it was being done for a reason."<MageKing17> **** ME<MageKing17> THE REASON IS PEOPLE ARE STUPID<MageKing17> ESPECIALLY ME

<MageKing17> God damn, I do not understand how this is breaking.<MageKing17> Everything points to "this should work fine", and yet it's clearly not working.<MjnMixael> 2 hours later... "God damn, how did this ever work at all?!"(...)<MageKing17> so<MageKing17> more than two hours<MageKing17> but once again we have reached the inevitable conclusion<MageKing17> How did this code ever work in the first place!?

<@The_E> Welcome to OpenGL, where standards compliance is optional, and error reporting inconsistent

<MageKing17> It was all working perfectly until I actually tried it on an actual mission.

<IronWorks> I am useful for FSO stuff again. This is a red-letter day!* z64555 erases "Thursday" and rewrites it in red ink

<MageKing17> TIL the entire homing code is held up by shoestrings and duct tape, basically.

Re: Voice acting in War in Heaven 2?

Generating the script is actually fairly easy (there's even a few comfort functions built into FRED that make it easier), it's adding all the extra information (like intonation, context info) that voice actors need that takes some time and can become challenging.

Have you guys considered doing this as you go for acts four and five, or will they suffer the same fate? (As I assume the dialogue for Act 4 is all but done already)